Psychology of Music

This study investigates children’s metarepresentational competence (MRC) with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa’s (2002) seminal work on MRC in mathematics and sciences as background, it aims to assess the relative importance children attribute to several criteria for representational adequacy of graphical representations of sonic stimuli, as well as to investigate the impact of children’s age and music background on their valuations of the relative importance of these criteria. Four groups of children (8–9- and 11–12-year-olds with and without extra music education) were exposed to short and simple sonic fragments. For each fragment they received a set of pairs of representations from which they had to choose one from each pair. The representations were organized in pairs of opposites for two of the four representational criteria involved in the study (correctness, formality, transparency, and neatness). The findings revealed a development in children’s personal hierarchies of representational criteria with growing age and musical education towards the following ranking: (1) correctness; (2) neatness; (3) formality; and (4) transparency. Theoretical, methodological, and educational implications are discussed.

An affective cross-modal priming paradigm was used in three experiments to test the effects of mode, consonance, and register in picture-evaluation and word-evaluation tasks. In experiment 1, participants heard major mode/minor mode, high-register/low-register chords (three tones) as primes and then they had to categorize a ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ word as a target. Participants evaluated target words faster if the words were preceded by a similarly valenced chord as opposed to affectively incongruent chord-word pairs. In experiments 2 and 3, target words were replaced by target affective pictures. In experiment 2, the primes were consonant/dissonant, high register/low-register chords. Register influenced picture evaluation whereas consonance was not effective for the affective priming. In experiment 3, the primes were major mode/minor mode, high-register/low-register chords. Register induced a faster recognition of targets while mode was not effective. Register is suggested to be a more powerful structural aspect of music than mode or consonance in influencing ongoing cognitive activities.

This research examined individuals’ preference for happy music when dealing with resolved versus unresolved sad events. In experiment 1 (N = 49), participants dealing with unresolved sad events were more likely to select music that was happy, exciting, upbeat, and active than those dealing with resolved sad events. Unresolved sadness participants also wanted to listen to music that was significantly happier, more exciting, more upbeat, and more active than the music selected by the resolved sadness participants. In experiment 2 (N = 79), we employed a ‘mood-freeze’ procedure to investigate whether participants in the unresolved sadness condition were motivated to select happy music in order to cope with their unresolved sad events. Specifically, we tested whether these individuals would still be motivated to select happy music if they were led to believe they could not regulate their feelings of sadness. As predicted, participants whose sadness was ostensibly frozen (unresolved/mood-freeze condition) and participants in resolved sadness condition were significantly less likely to select happy music, and wanted to listen to music that was less happy compared to those in the unresolved/control condition. These findings suggest that choice of happy music by the individuals dealing with unresolved sad events is motivated.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of cognitive load during practice on university wind students’ learning. Cognitive load was manipulated through instrument family (woodwind or brass) and the amount of repetition used in practice (highly repetitive or random). University woodwind and valved-brass students (N = 46) completed two practice sessions and two retention testing sessions. Participants practiced three seven-pitch tasks in either a blocked, repetitive order or in a random order. Performance trials were scored for accuracy, speed and evenness. At 24-hour retention, woodwind players who had practiced in a random order were able to play significantly faster, F(4,80) = 4.448, p = .003, η2 = .15, and more evenly, F(4,80) = 4.464, p = .003, η2 = .16, than woodwind players who had practiced in a blocked order. However, for brass players, blocked practice supported better accuracy, F(4,64) = 3.508, p = .012, η2 = .15, and speed, F(4,64) = 4.489, p = .003, η2 = .18, than random practice. A secondary research question examined participants’ judgment of learning. At the end of the second practice session, participants predicted the tempo they expected to be able to play the tasks at during the 24-hour retention session. A significant correlation between predicted and performed tempo was found for brass players using blocked practice (r = .360, p = .04).

This causal comparative study examined the consistency with which listeners from two cultures (Germany and the USA) associate extra musical concepts with four popular music genres (German folksy, country, punk, and hip-hop). The results showed that for internationally recognized genres (country, punk and hip-hop), the two countries made similar association patterns for all eight concepts measured (ethnicity, rural vs. urban culture, age, trustworthiness, expertise, attractiveness, friendliness, and political ideology). The study also revealed instances where the countries differed, such as hip-hop’s association with ethnicity and most of the German folksy associations. The results are discussed in light of models of musical meaning. Furthermore, an integration of societal-level and individual-level theories predicts these similarities and differences. The theories include massification, glocalization, and cognitive schemas.

Musical ability has been found to be associated with an enhancement of verbal working memory. In this study, we investigated whether this effect would generalize to visual-spatial working memory as would be expected if the effect were driven by general intelligence. We administered the WAIS-III Digit Span; the WMS-III Spatial Span; and the Musical Ear Test (MET), a forced-choice same/different listening task measuring musical ability, to non-musicians, amateur musicians, and expert musicians. Expert musicians significantly outperformed non-musicians on the Digit Span. Additionally, Digit Span Forward scores were found to be correlated with MET total scores and with scores on the rhythm subtest of the MET. No between-group differences were found on the Spatial Span.

Procedural memory consolidation has been shown to enhance a variety of perceptual and motor skills during sleep, but only recently has this effect been investigated in trained musicians performing music. I tested the extent to which expected music performance skill improves over a night of sleep and to what extent the new skill memory may be fragile following initial learning. Musicians (N = 60) learned a 13-note piano melody in individual evening training sessions under one of four practice conditions. Performance of the target melody was tested the next morning following a night of sleep. In line with previous research findings, subjects showed evidence of overnight gains in performance speed and accuracy. However, these results reveal, for the first time with musicians, that additional practice on a second, similar melody seems to inhibit these overnight gains, perhaps indicating that the overnight consolidation of new skill memories is susceptible to interference from similar tasks.